Return to the Crest
Monday, June 24th, 2024: Black Range, Hikes, Hillsboro, Nature, Plants, Southwest New Mexico.
I was fed up with this knee problem. I’d gotten used to my shoulders being in constant pain for five months, and after seven weeks of trying rest, ice, and compression, the knee wasn’t getting better either. So why not just go ahead and hike through the pain? I had plenty of pain meds left, might as well use them.
Sunday was forecast to be another hot day, and clear. I needed to find either a shaded canyon hike or a crest hike where elevation and breezes might keep me cool. Despite swearing never to drive that dangerous road again, I decided to tackle the crest hike in the east, where the road would take me to 8,200 feet and I would have the option of climbing an additional 1,500 to 2,000 feet higher depending on how bad the pain got. Like almost all my Sunday hikes, this one runs mostly inside the wilderness area.
As I should’ve expected, monsoon clouds were forming over the range, so it was actually cool when I got up there. I strapped on my compression brace, tighter than ever, in an attempt to mask the knee pain. I had to pee really bad, but as soon as I got out of sight and unzipped, I heard voices. I thought I was the only one who used this Forest Service road to access the trail, but when I turned, I saw a man and two women, youngish, dressed in what looked like cycling gear, leading two donkeys up the road.
“You caught me takin’ a piss! What are you doing with those donkeys?”
“Training ’em to race.”
I laughed. “Where do you race donkeys?”
“Mining towns, in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico.”
I was shaking my head. “Never heard of that.” One of the donkeys came over and nudged me, and I stroked its head and neck.
“He’s looking for carrots!” the youngest woman said.
Donkeys and burros are the same species, but it’s customary to call the domesticated variety donkeys and the feral ones burros. These were pale, as opposed to the brown feral burros I’m familiar with in the desert. At home, later, I looked up donkey racing and discovered that “pack burro racing” is indeed a thing – their trainers run through town with the animals on a leash. It’s another one of these ridiculous Anglo hobbies that accompany mining history and tourism. Thank god we don’t have it in my home town.
I expected to go slow to protect my knee, so I told them to go ahead. But they kept stopping and I kept catching up. Finally after a mile they said they were turning back and I should pass them. I recommended they go a few hundred yards farther for a spectacular view, but that was clearly of no interest to them. Privately, I wondered how walking a mile could possibly be adequate training for racing. Their whole vibe was a little weird, like they weren’t really comfortable around strangers.
I’d forgotten how amazing the flowers are here at this time of year – both perennials and annuals. They were mostly small flowers, and some quite unobtrusive, so I became obsessed with finding and photographing them all. It was actually good for my knee because I had to keep stopping for pictures.
By the time I reached the saddle where the trail switches from the east side to the west side, dark storm clouds were massing to the northwest, and I realized, happily, that I would likely get rain.
The next saddle was my first milestone, because I’d originally planned to turn back here, or if my knee was doing well, to take the bypass around the peak for some more mileage without the elevation gain. I definitely hadn’t planned on climbing the peak.
But I now realized that it isn’t elevation that’s hard on the knees, it’s the grade – the steepness. No part of this trail is nearly as steep as the trail I’d mistakenly tried a few days ago. So I decided to continue to the peak, which has grassy meadows and a remnant of old-growth fir forest that barely survived recent wildfires.
It was really dark by the time I got up there. I found fresh bear scat on the trail and heard a crashing sound in the forest below – either a limb or snag falling, or a bear tearing bark off to reach larvae.
At the peak, I decided to continue to the lower meadows on the back side, hoping to find wild iris. There had been a lot, but they’d all gone to seed.
Just as I started down, the rain caught me, and quickly became heavy enough to require my poncho. But as usual it lasted less than half an hour, and afterward, the whole landscape seemed to glow.
My knee was in bad shape, and I still had more than four miles to go, so I popped a pill.
Not only was the descent hard on my knee, taking close-ups of flowers and pollinators required contortions that triggered pain in my shoulders. My mother has been dealing with this for ten or fifteen years – she was too old for surgery – and she’s just learned not to raise or put any weight on that arm. That might be an option if both my shoulders weren’t equally bad.
Approaching the parking area in the saddle, I found Forest Service trucks and trailers surrounding my little vehicle. It turned out to be six or eight firefighters from northern California, called down for the wildfires east of here. They were just hanging out up here where it’s cool.
We discussed climate change and lookout towers. I mentioned how most of the old towers had been abandoned. “Yeah,” said their leader disgustedly, “They’re all gonna be replaced by cameras.”
“They’ll probably use AI,” I replied, and they all rolled their eyes. These young outdoorsmen clearly saw the downside of progress, and were not likely to be filling their homes with robots or joining Elon Musk in the Mars colony.
I drove through rain, and when I reached town I found the streets flooded, in the exact places where the city had spent millions recently to improve drainage. We’d clearly had a significant deluge, our first of the season, but the Apple weather app showed low current humidity and zero precip for the past 24 hours.
